Grand Illusion (1937)

No Quote for this film.

Fort Douaumont was the largest fort in the defenses of Verdun. It was taken by the Germans on February 24th 1916 and recaptured by the French on October 24th 1916 as part of the Battle of Verdun (February 21st 1916 to December 18th 1916). The recapture of the fort is estimated to have cost the French army 100,000 casualties. The selection of this battle for the film is significant as German and French historians often use the battle to represent the horrors of the Great War. Estimates of total deaths (French and German) range around the 300,000 mark, with total casualties between 750,000 and 1,000,000. Note also that Elsa's husband was killed at the battle for Verdun.
Goebbels made sure that the film's print was one of the first things seized by the Germans when they occupied France. He referred to Jean Renoir as "Cinematic Public Enemy Number 1". For many years it was assumed that the film had been destroyed in an Allied air raid in 1942. However, a German film archivist named Frank Hansel, then a Nazi officer in Paris, had actually smuggled it back to Berlin. Then when the Russians entered Berlin in 1945, the film found its way to an archive in Moscow. When Jean Renoir came to restore his film in the 1960s, he knew nothing of Hansel's acquisition and was working from an old muddy print. Purely by coincidence at the same time, the Russian archive swapped some material with an archive in Toulouse. Included in that exchange was the original negative print. However, because so many prints of the film existed at the time, it would be another 30 years before anyone realised that the version in Toulouse was actually the original negative.
The art director, 'Eugene Lourie', was the one who carved the nativity figures out of potatoes for the Christmas scene towards the film's end.
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